Sask. rural groups want to use poison on gophers again

WATCH: Gophers are on the minds of rural producers who are raising the idea of reinstating strychnine to deal with the invasive species.

Gophers are on the minds of rural producers as the 120th edition of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) Convention and Trade Show kicked off in Saskatoon.

Delegates, guests, and members of government gathered at Prairieland Park on Tuesday to voice their concerns and vote on issues affecting their rural municipalities. Many were calling for the reinstatement of strychnine to control gopher populations and protect crops.

“Strychnine is a product that worked; it worked very well,” said Bill Huber, president of SARM. “Our producers were comfortable with it. For the most part, they applied it properly.”

The pesticide was banned in 2024 by the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) and was phased out of use in Saskatchewan in 2023. However, producers say the alternatives don’t work nearly as well as strychnine.

“Some of the products that we have now, while they are somewhat effective at certain points in time, strychnine was a far, far superior product as far as efficacy and certainly financial ease of use.”

Huber said farmers want to do a job once, not return to complete the same task over and over again.

“Poisoning gophers and Richardson ground squirrels is a tedious, time-consuming job,” said Huber. “And producers have that do it and have to do it for the saviour of grass and field crops and stuff, they want a product that’s going to work where they don’t have to possibly come back out after two or three weeks.”

Welter added that the financial damage caused by gophers, whether through eating crops or injuring livestock with gopher holes, isn’t just borne by farmers. Crop insurance claims also cost the provincial and federal governments.

“If you seed canola and crop insurance is paying you $110 to $120 an acre to re-seed, and you lose that because of gophers, that’s a significant financial burden,” he said. “Both for the individual producer, but it’s also a financial burden for the province and the federal government.”

A provincial specialist in insect/invertebrate pest management production technology said that the damage caused by gophers without strychnine was substantial last year.

“The economic damage that they caused this year was, I will say relatively limited in the geographic area,” he said. “But where they did occur, they were very damaging.”

Tansey presented the findings of a multi-year study that suggested, if used properly and according to the label instructions, strychnine was a safe and effective tool for controlling gopher populations.

“We had very little in the way of non-target kill,” he said. “Our non-target kill was limited to literally four deer mice. And these were actually in the process of being buried by carrion beetles, so as to make them unavailable to scavengers.”

Despite presenting these findings along with the potential economic damage caused by gophers in Saskatchewan, Tansey isn’t optimistic that the PMRA will re-register strychnine.

“Because of that caveat of worst-case scenario, I think the likelihood of getting re-registration of strychnine is relatively low,” he said.

Huber said while he’s fought this battle more than a handful of times with the federal government, he’s hopeful the province will use the Saskatchewan First Act to reverse the ban.